Bechdel test
The Bechdel test, also known as the Bechdel–Wallace test, is a measure of the representation of women in film and other fiction. The test asks whether a work features at least two women who have a conversation about something other than a man. Some versions of the test also require that those two women have names.
A work of fiction passing or failing the test does not necessarily indicate the overall representation of women in the work. Instead, the test is used as an indicator of the active presence of women in fiction, and to call attention to gender inequality in fiction.
The test is named after the American cartoonist Alison Bechdel, in whose 1985 comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For the test first appeared. Bechdel credited the idea to her friend Liz Wallace and the writings of Virginia Woolf. Originally meant as "a little lesbian joke in an alternative feminist newspaper", according to Bechdel, the test became more widely discussed in the 2000s, as a number of variants and tests inspired by it emerged.
History
Gender portrayal in popular fiction
In a 1929 essay A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf wrote about the one-dimensional portrayal of women in contemporary fiction:In film, a study of gender portrayals in 855 of the most financially successful U.S. films from 1950 to 2006 showed that there were, on average, two male characters for each female character, a ratio that remained stable over time. Women were twice as likely as men to be involved in sexual activity, and this only continued to increase over time.
According to a 2014 study by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, in 120 films made worldwide from 2010 to 2013, only 31% of named characters were female, and 23% of the films had a female protagonist or co-protagonist. 7% of directors were women. Another study looking at the 700 top-grossing films from 2007 to 2014 found that only 30% of the speaking characters were female. In a 2016 analysis of screenplays of 2,005 commercially successful films, Hanah Anderson and Matt Daniels found that in 82% of the films, men had two of the top three speaking roles, while a woman had the most dialogue in only 22% of films.
Criteria and variants
The rules now known as the Bechdel test first appeared in 1986, in Alison Bechdel's comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For. In a strip titled "The Rule", two women, who resemble the future characters Lois and Ginger, discuss seeing a film and one woman explains that she only goes to a movie if it satisfies the following requirements:- The movie has to have at least two women in it,
- who talk to each other,
- about something other than a man.
The test has also been referred to as the "Bechdel–Wallace test", the "Bechdel rule", "Bechdel's law", or the "Mo movie measure". Bechdel credited the idea for the test to a friend and karate training partner, Liz Wallace, whose name appears in the marquee of the strip. She later wrote that she was pretty certain that Wallace was inspired by Woolf's A Room of One's Own.
Several variants of the test have been proposed—for example, that the two women must be named characters, or that there must be at least a total of 60 seconds of conversation. The test has also attracted academic interest from a computational analysis approach. In June 2018, the term "Bechdel test" was added to the Oxford English Dictionary.
According to Neda Ulaby, the test resonates because "it articulates something often missing in popular culture: not the number of women we see on screen, but the depth of their stories, and the range of their concerns". Dean Spade and Craig Willse described the test as a "commentary on how media representations enforce harmful gender norms" by depicting women's relationships to men more than any other relationships, and women's lives as important only insofar as they relate to men.
Use in film and television industry
The test moved into mainstream criticism in the 2010s and has been described as "the standard by which feminist critics judge television, movies, books, and other media". In 2013, Internet culture website The Daily Dot described it as "almost a household phrase, common shorthand to capture whether a film is woman-friendly". The failure of major Hollywood productions to pass the test, such as Pacific Rim, was addressed in-depth in the media.In 2013, four Swedish cinemas and the Scandinavian cable television channel Viasat Film incorporated the Bechdel test into some of their ratings, a move supported by the Swedish Film Institute.
In 2014, the European cinema fund Eurimages incorporated the Bechdel test into its submission mechanism as part of an effort to collect information about gender equality in its projects. It requires "a Bechdel analysis of the script to be supplied by the script readers".
In 2018, screenwriting software developers began incorporating functions that allow writers to analyze their scripts for gender representation. Software with such functions includes Highland 2, WriterDuet and Final Draft 11.
Application
In addition to films, the Bechdel test has been applied to other media such as television series, video games and comics. In theater, British actor Beth Watson launched a "Bechdel Theatre" campaign in 2015 that aims to highlight test-passing plays.Pass and fail proportions
The website bechdeltest.com is a user-edited database of over 10,000 films classified by whether they pass the test., it listed 57% of films in its database as passing all three of the test's requirements, 10% as failing one, 22% as failing two, and 11% as failing all three.According to Mark Harris of Entertainment Weekly, if passing the test were mandatory, it would have jeopardized half of the 2009 Academy Award for Best Picture nominees. The news website Vocativ, when subjecting the top-grossing films of 2013 to the Bechdel test, concluded that roughly half of them passed and the other half failed.
A 2018 BBC analysis revealed that among the 89 films that won the Academy Award for Best Picture, 44 successfully met the criteria of the Bechdel test. The study found that a higher percentage of Best Picture winners passed in the 1930s than in 2018. A 2022 study found that 49.6% of the 1,200 most popular movies globally over the previous 40 years passed the Bechdel test.
Writer Charles Stross noted that about half of the films that do pass the test only do so because the women talk about marriage or babies. Works that fail the test include some that are mainly about or aimed at women, or which do feature prominent female characters. The television series Sex and the City highlights its own failure to pass the test by having one of the four female main characters ask: "How does it happen that four such smart women have nothing to talk about but boyfriends? It's like seventh grade with bank accounts!".
Films set in alternative or future worlds, such as fantasy and science fiction, are more likely to pass the Bechdel test. This may be because these genres are more likely to avoid traditional gender roles and stereotypes.
Financial aspects
Several analyses have indicated that passing the Bechdel test is associated with a film's financial success. Vocativs authors found that the films from 2013 that passed the test earned a total of $4.22 billion in the United States, while those that failed earned $2.66 billion in total, leading them to conclude that a way for Hollywood to make more money might be to "put more women onscreen". A 2014 study by FiveThirtyEight based on data from about 1,615 films released from 1990 to 2013 concluded that the median budget of films that passed the test was 35% lower than that of the others. It found that the films that passed the test had about a 37 percent higher return on investment in the United States, and an equal ROI internationally, compared to films that did not pass the test.In 2018, the Creative Artists Agency and Shift7 analyzed revenue and budget data from the 350 top-grossing films of 2014 to 2017 in the United States. They concluded that female-led films financially outperformed other films, and that those that passed the Bechdel test significantly outperformed the others. They noted that of films since 2012 which took in more than one billion dollars in revenue, all passed the test.
A research study from 2022 showed that production budget was negatively associated with the probability of passing the Bechdel test across 1200 movies from 1980 to 2019. However, the observed increase of films passing across years was stronger for higher budget films. Increases of movies passing the Bechdel test over the years from 1980 to 2019 were also stronger for movies with higher revenues, and higher audience evaluations.
Explanations
Explanations that have been offered as to why many films fail the Bechdel test include the relative lack of gender diversity among scriptwriters and other movie professionals, also called the "celluloid ceiling": In 2012, one in six of the directors, writers, and producers behind the 100 most commercially successful movies in the United States was a woman.Writing in the American conservative magazine National Review in 2017, film critic Kyle Smith suggested that the reason for the Bechdel test results was that, "Hollywood movies are about people on the extremes of society—cops, criminals, superheroes— tend to be men." Such films, according to Smith, were more often created by men because "women's movie ideas" were mostly about relationships and "aren't commercial enough for Hollywood studios". He considered the Bechdel test just as meaningless as a test asking whether a film contained cowboys. Smith's article provoked vigorous criticism. Alessandra Maldonado and Liz Bourke wrote that Smith was wrong to contend that female authors do not write books that generate "big movie ideas", citing J. K. Rowling, Margaret Atwood, and Nnedi Okorafor, among others as counter-examples.